Forgive me for I have sinned, it's been a damned long
time since I've written.

Papers, papers, papers

Paper is proofread, and submitted. It's only a two page
preprint of sorts, but I am listed as an author. Page two
is pretty much most of my work over the past six months or
so. Lots of neutron scattering work, which is extremely fun
to do. Nothing more fun than feeling like an 31337 d00d
with a rad badge and access to nuclear reactors and particle
accelerators... That, and it gives me the chance to
experience what it's like to be at a computer terminal at 2
AM. Sources run 24 hours...mostly.

Only downside to the early morning work is the need to
stay awake. Missing a bug is one thing. Getting hand in
neutron beam is another (yes, Virginia, some setups will
allow you to happily irradiate yourself, if you so desire).

NG3

For the past few days in early May, I've been down at NIST
at NCNR on the NG3
beamline. It's a nice setup, different than the pulsed
source I've been going to. NIST's setup has a rather high
flux rate, but it being a reactor-based setup, I learned
about the pain of "moving the detector". Ugh. The infamous
"reactor setups sample some of the neutrons all of the time"
does suck when you're in a hurry. At least the samples
scatter very strongly.

Cable

Well, cable modem has been on the fritz hardcore, and
MediaONE blames me for having faulty equipment. Well, for a
while I thought they were full of it, until I moved the
modem downstairs to the basement and plugged it in closer to
where our CATV comes into the house.

Now, it works. Guess I wasn't getting much signal into
my room. Still makes me wonder how it's been working all
this time....

I'm going to be published soon. My advisor is going to
present a paper at an upcoming conference, and I'm a
co-author on it!

In other news, my meager home page is now XHTML 1.0 Strict
compliant. My widget still doesn't work, and I'm still me.
Oh well, 2 out of 4 isn't bad.

And my boots should be in soon, I hope. For my birthday I
decided to obtain some 20 hole Docs. Roomie who's a product
of a British military academy is going to lace them for me
in some strange manner. This will be fun.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Brass Monkey
Working on yet another GTK widget. This one has a Xwindow
parent. Right now, the code does nothing but not work.
Suck.

The widget's name? Gtk BrassMonkey. Why?

Licensed to Ill -- but it's more subtle than you
think.

What I'm going to use it for.

Tickets
Well, my tickets came in,
but I no longer have a date for that evening. Drat.

That, and I need to renew my license. Guess I'll have to
get a Massachusetts one. Of course, in true Massachusetts
tradition, it'll cost me 68 bucks since I'm from out of
state. Indiana only would charge me 10 bucks. Doubt I'll
save 50 bucks on the trip back home. Heaven help them if
they want me to register the car I don't own in MA...

FinalityWell, a lot of nasty questions were answered today.
Many of them with answers that what I didn't really want to
hear...or I first thought. Now that I do have at least some
closure, it isn't that bad. Funny how that works.

ldx #$1503 jsl $E10000
Well, seems like one of my favorite projects to track, KEGS
(Ken's Emulated GS), has become stagnant in it's
development. Sigh. And I wanted to get advanced border
effects working. Luckily, mfleming works
for Eazel, and I run into him from time to time on IRC.
He's not the maintainer for KEGS, but he is a fellow IIgs
hacker.

Unfortnately, he doen't know the specifics of the border
effect, namely registers/softswitches you have to watch.
Oh well. Was hoping if anyone else out in the Advogato
community would know. I also have one or two last places
to try...but I don't expect much. Finding old Apple][
hacks is getting harder and harder...

And yes, the Toolbox call represents my current state of
mind. Sad, isn't it?

...from the bottom, it looks like a steep
incline...
I've been stuck in a real valley recently. Hopefully
things will improve. I think my research will get better,
I now have all the tools I need at my disposal, and I
should be able to finish this up. should have something to
present at this year's AIChE conference, which would be
nice.

Now if my personal life can just follow the same
pattern. Alas, it appears that it's just one of those
things where I've just got to get used to disappointment...

...from the top, another downhill slope of
mine...
...and it's something that's damned hard to get used to.
I'm slowly migrating to the belief that parts of my life
follow the two laws of thermodynamics: first, you can
never win, you can only break even, and second, you can
never break even.

...but I know the equlibrium is
there...
But as MC Hawkingsays
: ...only in a closed system must the entropy count
rise...

Work
Well, I think I must have the World's Worst Luck (tm). I
couldn't go to GUADEC this year because I had something else
happening, namely experiments at NIST's reactor.

So, that means that yesterday, well after the
registration deadline and any chance to get something that
resembles a reasonable flight, I get a little e-mail.
E-mail says "reactor has had a coolant leak for a few months
now. Today, it got really bad, and we'll need to take the
reactor down for a few service cycles. Your experiment has
been rescheduled to a future date."

The cycles are roughly 20 days long. Great. OLS might
be out now as well.

Also, data analysis not going well again. I should have
just stayed in bed this week, and not come out until Sunday.

Germ Warfare
Well, I'm not strep positive. Damn. Either there was
something bacterial floating in my head (which I can still
buy due to certain things), or it was one fast virus.

Go West Young Man!
Gee. All these people in Western Mass. First
schoen (ok, he's from here
IIRC), and now
AilleCat. Anyone else out
in Advogato-land
hiding in Western Mass.?

Also, I cannot make GUADEC2 because of this. I'm going
down to NIST to do some scattering from the 5th to 9th of
April. Wish I could have made it, but it's becoming obvious
that the only way I can go to conferences is if they're in
my backyard. Sigh, the trials of a grad student.

Bacterium
Woke up yesterday feeling so-not-good. Day before, I
noticed I was getting a slight sore throat. Bells went off
in my head and decided to see a doctor.

Needless to say, with a pulse at 105 and 99.8F fever,
something was NOT right. My lab tests come back on Monday,
but I've started the penecillin. Most likely strep throat.
Not really comfortable with taking antibiotics w/o a
confirmed diagnosis...but the symptoms were just hard to
ignore (sore, red throat, fever, lack of any other symptoms,
just missing the white gook that usually collects in the
back of the throat). That, and after being on it for about
a day and a half, I do feel better (the fever broke, at
least).

So for today, I'm staying in bed. Resting.

SFS
Well, MediaOne blocks the SMB ports on their cablemodem
system. So, I was trying to find a good way to get my
massive ogg collection to my work computer. I never got
OpenAFS to compile, and there is no way in hell that I'm
going to do NFS over the internet. HTTP works, but I can't
seek on streams. Someone suggested SFS to me. Found it easy to
setup, and seems to work well enough.

qFinally got work computer. Now I can start fitting all
that neutron data I've accumulated. Wheee.

Also noticed the (lack of) good graphing software in
general. Currently using a version of Igor Pro for the
simple fact that NIST-Brookhaven has some neutron data
treatment routines for the software (you can even take the
raw counts from the area detector and treat it from there).

I think I'll work on one...someday...when I have time...

ColoursHair is now purple, I think. It seems to be different
colors under different lighting conditions.